SANDRO CHIA

Ceramic vs Drawing 1:0

The exhibition at the MIC consists of ceramic artworks expressly realized for the occasion (lots of them are conjugated with drawings, temperas and watercolours) and of a selection of recent pictorial works. Exibition by Franco Bertoni.

Born in Florence in 1946, Sandro Chia is one of the most known and appreciated Italian artists at international level.

After studying at the School of Art and at the Academy of Art in Florence, he travels to India, Turkey and Europe. In 1970 the artist settles in Rome. During 1970s he pursues researches in a conceptual field, that are abandoned somehow around the end of the decade. His aim is now to develop a pictorial research based on the return to figuration and to artwork’s pleasure under the sign of a renovated dialogue with all the history of art. After all, during the scholastic years, he had been attracted mainly just from the Florentine museums and, in 1966 he had done a journey to Paris only to visit the great anthology dedicated to Picasso.

His first personal exhibition is in 1971 at the Gallery “La Salita”, property of Gian Tomaso Liverani from Faenza. After that there were others in the same gallery and those of Lucrezia de Dominicis, ones, Giuliana de Crescenzo, Gian Enzo Sperone and Mario Diacono in Rome, the Tucci Russo’s ones in Turin and Paul Maenz’s in Cologne. In 1980 he is invited for the first time to the Biennal of Venice where he exhibits in the section “Open 80” by Harald Szeemann and Achille Bonito Oliva. The exhibition, extensively reviewed from the critics, opens the happy season of the Transavant-garde aimed to inform the developments of art not only the Italian and European one. As it is good reported from Bonito Oliva: “ Sandro Chia operates on a styles’ range, always supported by a technical mastery and by an idea of art, that finds inside itself the reasons of its own existence. Such reasons consist in the pleasure of a painting at last saved from the novelty’s tyranny and rather it is committed to the abilities of using different “ways” to arrive to the image. The reference points are countless, without any exclusion, from Chagall to Picasso, from Cézanne to De Chirico, from the futurist Carrà to Carrà supporter of metaphysics and the XX century”. In Sandro Chia’s artwork constantly emerges the necessity of a particular title, of a poem maybe painted directly on the work or of a long caption. This description is useful to increase in an elliptical way a mechanism, serious and ironic at the same time, of appropriations and inventions, of references and wrongfooted deflections. Between the artwork’s strong physical presence and the intellectual solicitations it is established an indissoluble relation of reciprocity, that constantly moving the references gives an interrogative and through and through particular digit to his work. After all is the artist himself asserting: “ It is not excluded that painting a picture is continuing a pending story or telling a story and then leaving it in abeyance”. The Sandro Chia’s stories have the most various origins – from myth to reality, from art classics to avant-gardes, from photography to cinema – but just for this reason they can tell a fluid contemporary condition, which is in continuous transformation or metamorphosis, without quietened solutions. Between 1980 and 1981, the artist lives and works in Mönchengladbach in Germany and in 1981 he moves to the United States, working between New York and Ronciglione, and then Montalcino. He also devotes himself to sculpture realizing a four-handed sculpture with Enzo Cucchi for the art dealer from Modena Emilio Mazzoli. In the 1980s and 1990s he does personal exhibitions at the Staedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1983), at the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover (1984), at the Musée d’Art Moderne in the Ville of Paris (1984), at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1984), at the Kunsthalle in Bielefeld (1985), in Spoleto (1988), at the Medici Riccardi Palace in Florence (1991), at Villa Medici in Rome (1995), at the Royal Palace in Milan (1997), at the Civic Gallery in Trento (2000), at the Boca Raton Museum of Art in Florida (2007), at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag (2008), at the National Gallery of Art in Rome (2009-2010). He exhibits, in addition, at the Biennals of Paris, of San Paolo in Brasil and lots of times at the Biennal of Venice, where in 2009, he exhibits in the Italian Pavilion. In 2003 the Italian State purchases three of his artworks for the collections of the Republic’s Senate at Madama Palace. In 2005 two of his monumental sculptures are placed in front of the Rome Province’s seat and in 2010 one of his sculptures is positioned in the Cathedral Square in Florence.